its friends and old companions, and
the mental outline of the common world, faintly drawn by memory,
becomes more and more dim and indistinct, like the surface of the
earth to one who soars upward in a balloon, and is at length blended
with the gray shadows of forgotten thought, which disturb me no more.
But anon some rude and jarring discord, from the world below, pierces
upward to my ear, and the air becomes suddenly dark and dreary, and
dusty, and I fall heavily to earth again.

As years steal by, these fits of delightful abstraction become rarer
and rarer. My visions seem to have lost their substantiality; and even
when they do revisit me, they are thin and transparent, and no longer
hide the real world from my sight--yet they hold strange power over
me; and when they come upon my soul, although they do not all conceal
the real, yet they concentrate upon some casual object there, and
impart to it a spirituality of aspect and quality which straightway
embalms it in my heart. Thus do I invest the faces of friends with a
holiness and fervor of devotion which belongs not to them; and when I
have wreaked the treasures of my soul upon objects thus elevated above
their real quality, I find what a false vision I have been
worshiping--its higher qualities mingle again with my own thoughts,
whence they emanated, and the real object stands before me, low, dull,
and insipid as the thousands of similar ones by which it is
surrounded. Thus do I, enamored of qualities and perfections which
exist only in my own thought, continually cheat and delude myself into
the belief that a congenial spirit has been found, when some trivial
incident breaks the spell--the charms I loved glide back to my own
soul, and the charmer, unconscious of change in himself, wonders what
has wrought so sudden an alteration in me. Then come heart-burnings
and self-reproaches against those I have foolishly loved, of
treachery, hypocrisy, and ingratitude, which they cannot understand,
and over which I mourn and weep.

I had a friend once--not long ago, for the turf is still fresh over
his gentle breast--whose soul was fashioned like my own, save that he
was all softness, and wanted the hardness and commonplace which events
and years have given to me. For a long and delightful season we held
sweet converse together; and, although he was much younger than I, yet
was there no restraint or concealment between us. Every throb of his
heart, almost every evolution